MARS, short for microprogrammable accelerator for rapid simulations, is a multiprocessor-based hardware accelerator that canefficiently implement a wide range of computationally complex algorithms. In addition to accelerating many graph-related problemsolutions, MARS is ideally suited for performing event-driven simulations of VLSI circuits. Its highly pipelined and parallelarchitecture yields a performance comparable to that of existing special-purpose hardware simulators. MARS has the added advantageof flexibility because its VLSI processors are custom-designed to be microprogrammable and reconfigurable. When programmedas a logic simulator, MARS should be able to achieve 1 million gate evaluations per second.